Disclaimer: the posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Egypt, the world's most populous Arab country, is suddenly roiling with a wide-open, combative election that seems certain to end with the country's main Islamic group, the banned Muslim Brotherhood, as a big winner.

The country's rulers, longtime American allies, are starting to show signs of panic: Police have barred voters from polls and thugs have attacked Brotherhood supporters in recent days in an apparent effort to blunt the group's growing momentum.

Even before the final round of voting Thursday, Brotherhood loyalists have increased their seats in parliament fivefold. That's not enough to unseat the ruling party, but is still seen as a slap to President Hosni Mubarak.The following is taken fromhttp://www.redmoonrising.com/Ikhwan/BritIslam.htmPrior to World War II British Intelligence cultivated ties with the Brotherhood through agent Freya Stark, the British adventurer and writer (1). These covert connections were used to keep track of the growing German presence in North Africa and to stay informed of the many different political movements that were springing up. The Muslim Brotherhood spread throughout the Muslim world and has evolved into something like a Muslim equivalent of the West's Masonic brotherhood. It became one of the first Islamic Fundamentalist terror organizations...

"According to CIA agent Miles Copeland, the Americans began looking for a Muslim Billy Graham around 1955... When finding or creating a Muslim Billy Graham proved elusive, the CIA began to cooperate with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim mass organization founded in Egypt but with followers throughout the Arab Middle East... This signalled the beginning of an alliance between the traditional regimes and mass Islamic movements against Nasser and other secular forces." (1)

The CIA was following the example of British Intelligence and sought to use Islam to further its goals. They wanted to find a charismatic religious leader that they could promote and control and they began to cooperate with groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood. With the rise of Nasser the Brotherhood was also courted more seriously by the pro-Western Arab regimes of Saudi Arabia and Jordan. They needed all the popular support that they could muster against the rise of Nasser-inspired Arab nationalism to keep their regimes intact.

The Muslim Brotherhood was an obvious ally against Nasser, because he had abolished it from Egypt after it was involved in a failed assassination attempt on his life in 1954. The Brotherhood rejected Nasser's policy that, for the most part, kept religion out of politics. Officially the Brotherhood was an outlawed organization, but it remained influential and active within Egypt working against the secular regime, often hand-in-hand with British Intelligence. In June of 1955 MI6 was already approaching the Brotherhood in Syria to agitate against the new government that showed strong left-wing tendencies and a desire to merge with Egypt (2). The Brotherhood became an even more important asset after Nasser announced the Egyptian takeover of the Suez...

In Syria, in 1982, there was a major conflict between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Syrian government at the city of Hamma that resulted in 20,000 casualties. In the aftermath Syria's President Asad revealed that the Muslim Brotherhood forces were armed with US-made equipment...

Israel, forever inclined to back divisive movements, surfaced as another supporter of Islam and began to fund the Muslim Brotherhood and the Palestinian Islamic movement Hamas." (8)The most noteworthy success of the Islamic movement during this time was of course the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and the installation of the Ayatollah Khomeini as the Islamic dictator. British Intelligence had used their contacts with Iran's mullahs and ayatollahs to help overthrow Mossadegh and install the Shah back in 1953, and these contacts were maintained and used again to overthrow the Shah when his regime fell out of favor.

The Establishment history of Iran's Islamic Revolution is that Khomeini's revolt was spontaneous and populist, and that it overthrew a repressive dictatorship that was hated by the people but supported wholeheartedly by the United States. It is true that the Shah's government was not a democracy and that his secret service, trained by the CIA, was one of the most effective intelligence organizations in the world. But what is not reported is that prior to the British-sponsored massive public relations campaign on behalf of the Ayatollah the government of the Shah was loved by the vast majority of the population.

After taking over from Mossadegh the Shah began to push forward a number of nationalist policies that increased his popularity at home but, in some cases, worried the Anglo-American Establishment. First, he signed petroleum agreements with ENI, the Italian oil company. Then in 1963 he pushed forward on a series of popular reforms that became known as the White Revolution. The Shah evolved into a nationalist whose path paralleled that of Nasser far too much for the Establishment's liking:

- He bought land from the upper classes and, along with the crown's own land, sold it back cheaply to tenant farmers, allowing over one a half million people to become land owners and ending the old feudal system.

- He allowed women the right to vote, and brought an end to the wearing of the veil, which were "Westernizing" moves unwelcomed by the religious sector.

- He pushed forward on a $90 billion nuclear power program.

- He moved to shut down the lucrative opium industry that had been created during the days of British Empire control that had been running for a hundred years. (9)...

The attack on the Shah's government came through the Muslim Brotherhood and through the mullahs and ayatollahs of Iran, supported and manipulated by British Intelligence...

Dr. John Coleman, a former British Intelligence agent... states in his report on Iran's Islamic Revolution (11) that the Muslim Brotherhood was created by "the great names of British Middle East intelligence" ...and that their mission was to "keep the Middle East backward so that its natural resource, oil, could continue to be looted..."

Dr. Coleman writes that in 1980 the broadcasts of Radio Free Iran divided the enemies of the Shah into four categories: 1. Iranian politicians bought by the Israeli Shin Bet, 2. The CIA's network of agents, 3. The feudal landowners, 4. The Freemasons and the Muslim Brotherhood (viewed as the same enemy).

In his report Dr. Coleman writes that in Iran, "At one time there was even a joke about the mullahs being stamped 'made in Britain.'" When the Shah introduced his plan for modernization in 1963 the Ayatollah Khomeini emerged as the leader of the religious opposition. Up until his exile from Iran in 1964, Khomeini was based at the religious city of Qom. Dr. Coleman relates that Radio Free Iran claimed that while at Qom Khomeini received a "monthly stipend from the British, and he is in constant contact with his masters, the British."

Monday, November 28, 2005

Mitterrand had authorised the bombing. He wanted to stop Greenpeace disrupting French nuclear weapon tests in the Pacific.

Sections of the French media claimed that French secret agents had bought the dinghies used to plant the bombs from people close to MI6 and that MI6 knew of the planned sabotage. By late August the Sunday Times was telling the Foreign Office that "French official sources were briefing freely to 'anyone who would listen' about British involvement".

Thursday, November 24, 2005

ANKARA, Nov 23 (Reuters) - Turkey's parliament gave the go-ahead on Wednesday for an investigation into a bookshop bombing in Turkey's troubled southeast that many blamed on security forces and sparked weeks of violence.

One person was killed in the Nov. 9 bombing in the town of Semdinli and several more died in clashes it triggered between pro-Kurdish protesters and security forces.

It is rare for parliament to launch probes into incidents allegedly involving the military or police and the vote in parliament was taken by raising hands during a special session.

But Interior Minister Abdulkadir Aksu told parliament it was the government's duty to find out what happened in Semdinli.

The parliamentary commission was approved by the ruling Justice and Development (AKP) party and the main opposition parties.

Bombing suspects detained by police turned out to be intelligence agents of the gendarmerie -- a paramilitary force responsible for rural security -- fuelling suspicions that men in uniform may be taking the law into their own hands.

A top Turkish general has angrily rejected claims that bombers acted on the orders of senior military commanders, the Hurriyet daily said on Wednesday.

"I strongly reject (the claims that the order came from Ankara)," General Yasar Buyukanit told Hurriyet in the first detailed public response by Turkey's powerful military.

Buyukanit, who heads Turkey's Land Forces, said he believed the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) carried out the bombing, along with others in the region in recent weeks, but declined to comment further as a legal process is now under way.

"We respect the decision of the court," Buyukanit said.

He also denied any attempt to cover up what happened, noting that two gendarmes released by prosecutors after initial questioning would still stand trial over their alleged role.

Critics of Turkey's authorities say the bombing may have been engineered by hardliners as a "provocation" to help create the atmosphere for a crackdown on Kurdish groups in the region. The bookshop was reported to be owned by a former PKK member.

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

November 21, 2005 ... Israel's Labor Party dumped the pedantic Shimon Peres and replaced him with social democratic labor union firebrand Amir Peretz, a decision welcomed in Damascus, Cairo, and elsewhere in the Arab world.

Peretz is an Arabic-speaking native of Morocco and is on very good terms with Israel's one million-strong Arab community, especially the Arab working class.

He says he will scrap the ridiculous pro-Likud American "Road Map" and negotiate directly with the Palestinian Authority...

Look for Peretz to squeeze the Russian-Ukrainian-Israel Mafia of wealthy Russian and other former Soviet gangsters who have seized control of Israel through their alliance with the corrupt Likud Party.

Sharon obviously read the tea leaves and is jumping a sinking corrupt right wing ship dominated by gangsters and religious fanatics (sounds a lot like the Bush administration). Sharon is forming his own "centrist" political party with the ousted Shimon Peres, deeply fracturing the Israeli Right and consolidating the left around Peretz's Labor Party.

The purge of Peres from Labor is being echoed in the U.S. Democratic Party, where Rep. Jack Murtha's anti-war speech last week is putting the spotlight on leading Democrats who oppose a withdrawal from Iraq -- namely, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Joe Lieberman and Representatives Rahm Emanuel and Steny Hoyer. All are "neo con lite" and quickly becoming irrelevant as the Democratic Party finds its anti-war footing thanks to Murtha, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Russ Feingold, and others.

In Sri Lanka, leftist Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse won the presidency on a platform of nationalization of the economy, a direct slap in the face of the World Bank of Paul Wolfowitz, which abhors state control of any portion of any national economy. His defeated opponent was a free market proponent. Sri Lanka now joins neighboring India (and its ruling Congress Party) in an emerging bloc of leftist governments in South Asia. Seven opposition parties have held talks with Communist rebels in Nepal with a view that Nepal may soon relegate its fascist pro-American King to the ash heap of history...

In Europe, British Prime Minister Tony Blair faces a rebellion in his own Labor Party and possible impeachment over the Iraq war...

Italy's neo-fascist Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is on the electoral ropes from Italy's leftist coalition, including the Communists. In Norway, the Socialists beat a conservative Prime Minister with ties to the Christian Right in the United States.

It is Latin America that is leading the global progressive resurgence. Michelle Bachelet, tortured by the U.S.-supported Pinochet regime is the front runner to become the next President of Chile. After Pinochet's coup and after being tortured, she moved to the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) to rebuild the Chilean Socialist Party. Bachelet is 24 percentage points ahead of her conservative and global neocon-backed rival.

In next year's Mexican presidential election, former Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, is the front runner to succeed conservative Vicente Fox. The election is scheduled for next July 2.

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez is as strong as ever and continues to berate Bush, calling him "Mr. Danger." Chavez and a phalanx of Latin American leaders of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil blocked Bush's Free Trade Area of the Americas pro-corporate contrivance at the recent Americas summit in Argentina.

In Bolivia, coca growers' union leader Evo Morales leads in polls for the Dec. 18 presidential election. He will reverse privatization and begin a policy of state control of the energy industry. In Nicaragua, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega stands a good chance of becoming the country's president after elections next year.

The signs are unmistakable that the progressive left is on the march throughout the United States and around the world. Meanwhile, Bush couldn't make it out of a door in Beijing.

London, 22 Nov. (AKI) - A "Top Secret" document from the British prime minister's office shows that US president George W. Bush planned to bomb the satellite TV station Al Jazeera, despite it being owned by the Qatari government, a key US ally.

The British newspaper The Mirror revealed details of the leaked memo, and said Bush was talked out of the plan by British premier Tony Blair, who said such an action would cause "a worldwide backlash".

While the newspaper reported one government official as dismissing the president's suggestion as "humorous, not serious", another source told the paper: "Bush was deadly serious, as was Blair. That much is absolutely clear from the language used by both men."The information came from a five page transcript of a conversation between the two leaders during talks in April last year, when Blair visited Bush in Washington.

The prime minister's office is now under pressure to publish the full transcript.

Former Labour Defence Minister Peter Kilfoyle told journalists: "It's frightening to think that such a powerful man as Bush can propose such cavalier actions. I hope the Prime Minister insists this memo be published. It gives an insight into the mindset of those who were the architects of war."

The memo turned up last year at the constituency office of Labour MP Tony Clarke, who handed it back to the prime minister's office. Cabinet Office civil servant David Keogh has been accused under the Official Secrets Act of passing it to Leo O'Connor, who used to work for Clarke. Both men are due to appear in court next week.Al Jazeera has angered many governments with its coverage, particularly the Bush administration, which has accused the station of fuelling the insurgency in Iraq.

It has been criticised for its reports from behind rebel lines, as well as showing pictures of dead soldiers and civilians, and broadcasting video messages issued by Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders.

In 2001, the Al Jazeera's office in the Afghan capital Kabul was hit by two "smart" bombs.

Two years later, correspondent Tareq Ayyoub was killed when US missiles hit Al Jazeera's Baghdad office, and his colleague - former Kabul correspondent Taysir Allouni, who is currently appealing a seven year jail sentence in Spain after being found guilty of being a member of al-Qaeda - narrrowly escaped.

The new licensing laws were condemned as "ineffective" yesterday after a pub with a history of violence won its campaign to stay open.

The Walkabout, an Australian-themed bar in Bournemouth, faced closure when the borough council rejected its licence application in September after police objections. But at an appeal on Monday, believed to be the first of its kind under the Licensing Act 2003, magistrates in Blandford, Dorset, granted the licence.

Sunday, November 20, 2005

Colonel Tim Collins's autobiography Rules of Engagement describes how UK troops were trained to use white phosphorus to kill Iraqis.

Article two of Protocol Three of the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons bans the use of the weapon against civilians and also military targets located within civilian areas. Although the US is not a signatory of the convention, Britain is.

According to Sean Raymont, Defence Correspondent, in the Sunday Telegraph, 20 November 2005:

Colonel Tim Collins, former UK Iraq war commander, trained his troops to fight with white phosphorus.

The revelation in Collins's autobiography Rules of Engagement, contradicts claims by the Ministry of Defence that the chemical was only ever used to create a smokescreen.

According to The Telegraph, British troops also used white phosphorus to kill Argentinian troops during the Falklands conflict.

In his book, Col Collins describes how he trained 1bn Royal Irish Regiment for an attack codenamed Operation Fury planned for April 2003.

Collins said that he "directed" the men to "perfect" house-to-house fighting skills in preparation for the battle.

Collins wrote:

"The star of the show was the new grenade which had only been on issue since the previous summer. It absolutely trashed the inside of the room it was put into.

"I directed the men to use them where possible with white phosphorus, as the noxious smoke and heat had the effect of drawing out any enemy from cover, while the fragmentation grenade would shred them."

According to The Telegraph:

Col Collins' tactics mirror the United States army "shake and bake" technique which involves forcing troops out of cover with white phosphorus and then killing them with artillery rounds.

The furore surrounding the weapon emerged last week after Lt Col Barry Venable, a Pentagon spokesman, used almost identical phraseology to Col Collins, when he confirmed that "shake and bake" was a recognised American tactic.

In an interview with the BBC, Col Venable said: "When you have enemy forces in covered positions that your high explosive artillery rounds are not having an impact on, one technique is to fire white phosphorus into the position because the combined effects of the fire and smoke will drive them out so that you can kill them with high explosives."

He confirmed: "It was used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants."

White phosphorus has been used by the British Army for decades to create instantaneous smokescreens during battle. In contact with skin, however, it burns to the bone and the gas it produces, phosphorus pentoxide, is poisonous.

Article two of Protocol Three of the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons bans the use of the weapon against civilians and also military targets located within civilian areas. Although the US is not a signatory of the convention, Britain is.

But there is now increasing debate as to whether the use of the weapon should instead fall under the United Nations Convention on Chemical Weapons.

Last week John Reid, the Defence Secretary, maintained the British troops had only ever used white phosphorus as a battlefield smokescreen. His department continued to stress that troops had never used it as "an incendiary weapon, against either civilians or even enemy combatants".

Although Operation Fury was cancelled, it remains unclear whether British troops went on to use white phosphorus against Iraqi forces, putting Col Collins' style of attack into action.

Prof Paul Rogers, of Bradford University's peace studies department, said he believed that most soldiers would use all weapons at their disposal.

He said: "There is a presumption among certain members of the population that wars are clean. They are not."Pentagon spokesman

Friday, November 18, 2005

It should come as no surprise the supposed Muslim terrorist group “captured” in Australia is a creation of the British MI5 and the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO).

As Greg Ansley writes for the New Zealand Herald, the group was busted by a “supergrass” agent (the term supergrass is used in Northern Ireland to refer to arrested paramilitaries who divulged the identities of their compatriots to the Royal Ulster Constabulary in exchange for immunity from prosecution, in other words informers).

“Yesterday Melbourne’s Sunday Herald Sun said information from an Islamic ’supergrass’ who had met bin Laden had been crucial in the arrests of the alleged terrorists,” the Herald reports.

“The newspaper said the informant, now in hiding and in fear of his life, was a former follower of radical Melbourne cleric Abdul Nacer Benbrika, also known as Abu Bakir, the alleged leader of the terror group, and an associate of another alleged member of the Melbourne cell, Gregory Kent…. Benbrika, according to a Weekend Australian investigation, had turned to extremism after hearing a sermon in 1994 by Abu Qatada, the spiritual leader of al-Qaeda in Europe, who had been invited to Australia by another Melbourne radical cleric and former Benbrika mentor, Sheik Mohammed Omran.”

As we know, Abu Qatada, described as the leader and mastermind of al-Qaeda’s European network, is an MI5 asset.

“Senior European intelligence officials tell TIME that Abu Qatada is tucked away in a safe house in the north of England, where he and his family are being lodged, fed and clothed by British intelligence services,” Paul Joseph Watson writes in Order Out of Chaos. “Despite official denial French anti-terrorist officers stated on the record that they were certain MI5 were protecting Qatada, and in addition believed they had actually colluded in his disappearance.”

Qatada was convicted in absentia in Jordan for his role in the foiled millennium attacks and the French want to get their hands on him for his alleged role in a plot to blow up the U.S. embassy in France in 2001.

The official British excuse for sheltering Qatada is to deprive him of “contact with extremists in London and Europe,” according to Bruce Crumley, writing for TIME. “The British win because the last thing they want is a hot potato they can’t extradite for fear of al-Qaeda reprisals but whose presence contradicts London’s support of the war on terror,” a European intelligence official told Crumley in 2002.

In other words, Abu Qatada is too valuable as an intelligence asset and knows too much about British involvement in terrorism to be extradited.

In fact, in late 2001, MI5 offered Qatada a chance to escape to Afghanistan. “I do not trust this government,” Qatada told the Guardian. “If I get on a plane, I am afraid I will be shot or handed over to the Jordanians, the Egyptians or the Saudis.”

In other words, Qatada feared he would suffer the fate of many intelligence operatives and patsies who are of more use dead than alive, or at least wasting away in a dungeon.

For instance, Bisher al-Rawi, a British resident and “unpaid [al-Qaeda] intermediary,” was “seized by the CIA in Gambia, West Africa, in November 2002 and secretly flown to Afghanistan and then Cuba [to the Guantanamo Bay rape and torture gulag] as a suspected al-Qa’ida supporter,” according to the Independent, and the British left him there to rot, or more accurately to be “interrogated” (possibly with panties over his head and electrical wires attached to a certain appendage) and probably wishing he was dead, as the high attempted suicide rate at Gitmo attests.

Another person protected by British intelligence is one Haroon Rashid Aswat, the so-called “brains” behind the London bombings last summer.

Aswat “was a British intelligence plant,” according to former Justice Department prosecutor John Loftus. “So all of a sudden he disappears. He’s in South Africa. We think he’s dead; we don’t know he’s down there. Last month [July, 2005] the South African Secret Service come across the guy. He’s alive… the Brits know that the CIA wants to get a hold of Haroon. So what happens? He takes off again, goes right to London. He isn’t arrested when he lands, he isn’t arrested when he leaves… He’s on the watch list. The only reason he could get away with that was if he was working for British intelligence.”

“[Qatada’s] impact [on Benbrika] was enormous, and that is where it all began,” a senior Muslim source told the Sunday Herald Sun. In short, the roots of this “captured” coven of terrorists in Australia stem from British intelligence, a familiar pattern, from Northern Ireland—killing civilians and bombing pubs—to Kosovo—creating organizations such as al-Muhajiroun (actually a collaborative effort between British intelligence and al-Qaeda, according to Loftus) engineered to brainwash and train “Mujahideen” to fight in the Balkans and assist the KLA (the Kosovo Liberation Army, a creation of British SAS Special Forces and NATO) in running drugs and weapons.

British, American, and Pakistani efforts to create terrorist organizations and cells is a well-documented fact, going back at least to the late 1970s.

Thus we can only conclude that the “alleged Islamic terrorist cell in Sydney” that supposedly “stockpiled bomb-making materials, trained at outback hunting camps and sized up Australia’s only nuclear reactor as a possible target,” according to the Associated Press, is yet another intelligence contrivance, as it was penetrated by ASIO and key people are in fact British intelligence assets.

In 2003, the Howard government pushed the ASIO Terrorism Act through the Australian parliament, thus providing “the Australian Security Intelligence Organization … the power to detain and question people without charge or trial. ASIO and Federal Police officers can raid anyone’s home or office, at any hour of the day or night, and forcibly take them away, interrogate and strip-search them and hold them incommunicado, effectively indefinitely,” write Mike Head and Richard Hoffman. As such, we can expect the Australian government to stage more raids on “terror cells” with links to intelligence services.

Fake terrorism leading to the dismantlement of civil liberties is the raison d’être of all authoritarian governments, from Hitler’s “Law for Removing the Distress of the People and the Reich” (the Enabling Act, dismantling civil liberties in Germany after the torching of the Reichstag, an act of arson claimed by Hermann Goering, Hitler’s deputy and legal heir) to Bush’s contrived war on terrorism in the wake of the nine eleven inside job.

9 11 was almost certainly the work of elements of both the US government and its allies. 9 11

Subsequent acts of terror such as the Madrid and London bombs are almost certainly the work of elements of western and pro-western governments. 'Moslem' bombers are usually linked to the CIA and other security services.

We are guilty for allowing all inspection and critical apparatus – both military and civilian – to fall apart in front of our very eyes.

Once again, judges tell us investigations are a sad joke. But mainly we are all guilty because we continue to send another generation of young people to this bloody area, with no real desire to think about what this means.

~

The following is a recording of a three-way conversation that took place between a soldier in a watchtower, an army operations room and Capt R, who shot the girl.

"It's a little girl. She's running defensively eastward."

"Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?"

"A girl about 10, she's behind the embankment, scared to death."

"I think that one of the positions took her out."

"I and another soldier ... are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill ... Receive a situation report. We fired and killed her ... I also confirmed the kill. Over."

An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday. http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1643573,00.html

Melbourne's Sunday Herald Sun said information from an Islamic "supergrass" who had met bin Laden had been crucial in the arrests of the alleged terrorists.

The newspaper said the informant, now in hiding and in fear of his life, was a former follower of radical Melbourne cleric Abdul Nacer Benbrika, also known as Abu Bakir, the alleged leader of the terror group, and an associate of another alleged member of the Melbourne cell, Gregory Kent.

The informant had trained with al Qaeda in Pakistan in 2001, where bin Laden had asked him how Muslims were faring in Australia, before returning and co-operating with counter-terrorism officials, the Sunday Herald Sun said.

Friday, November 11, 2005

At vdare.com, 5 November 2005, Kevin MacDonald, Professor of Psychology at California State University-Long Beach, wrote an article entitled “Stalin’s Willing Executioners”?

The article looks at Yuri Slezkine’s book The Jewish Century, which received rapturous reviews.The Jewish Century describes the Jewish rise 'to elite status in all areas of Soviet society—culture, the universities, professional occupations, the media, and government.'

The book also describes 'Jewish economic and cultural pre-eminence in Europe (and America)'.

Slezkine is a Russian immigrant of partially Jewish extraction. Arriving in America in 1983, he is now a professor at U.C. Berkeley.

MacDonald looks at Slezkines's comparison of the Jews with the Chinese. Mac Donald writes:

The Overseas Chinese ... are indeed highly intelligent and entrepreneurial, like the Jews. But I would arguethe aggressiveness of the Jews, compared to the relative political passivity of the Overseas Chinese, invalidates the comparison.

We do not read of Chinese cultural movements dominating the major local universities and media outlets, subjecting the traditional culture of Southeast Asians and anti-Chinese sentiment to radical critique —or of Chinese organizations campaigning for the removal of native cultural and religious symbols from public places...

Slezkine obscures the plain fact that Jewish history in the period he discusses constitutes a spectacularly, arguably uniquely, successful case of what I have described as an ethnocentric group competitive strategy in action...

Slezkine ... understates the power of ethnocentrism and group competitiveness as unifying factors in Jewish history.

This competitiveness was of course notorious in Eastern Europe before the 1917 revolution. Slezkine ignores, or at least does not spell out, the extent to which Jews were willing agents of exploitative elites in traditional societies, not only in Europe, but in the Muslim world as well. Forming alliances with exploitative elites is arguably the most reliably recurrent theme observable in Jewish economic behavior over the ages.

Indeed, Slezkine shows that this pattern effectively continued in Russia after the Revolution: Jews became part of a new exploitative elite...A major contribution of Slezkine’s book is to document that Communism was, indeed, “good for the Jews.” After the Revolution, there was active elimination of any remnants of the older order and their descendants...

Beyond the issue of demonstrating that the Jews benefited from the Revolution lies the more important question of their role in implementing it. Having achieved power and elite status, did their traditional hostility to the leaders of the old regime, and to the peasantry, contribute to the peculiarly ghastly character of the early Soviet era? On this question, Slezkine’s contribution is decisive...

Jews were prominent among the Bolsheviks, and once the Revolution was underway, the vast majority of Russian Jews became sympathizers and active participants.

Jews were particularly visible in the cities and as leaders in the army and in the revolutionary councils and committees. For example, there were 23 Jews among 62 Bolsheviks in the All-Russian Central Executive Committee elected at the Second Congress of Soviets in October, 1917. Jews were leaders of the movement and to a great extent they were its public face.

Their presence was particularly notable at the top levels of the Cheka and OGPU (two successive acronyms for the secret police). Here Slezkine provides statistics on Jewish overrepresentation in these organizations, especially in supervisory roles, and quotes historian Leonard Shapiro’s comment that “anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with and possibly shot by a Jewish investigator.”

During the 1930s, Slezkine reports, the secret police, now known as the NKVD, “was one of the most Jewish of all Soviet institutions”, with 42 of the 111 top officials being Jewish. At this time 12 of the 20 NKVD directorates were headed by ethnic Jews, including those in charge of State Security, Police, Labor Camps, and Resettlement (deportation).

The Gulag was headed by ethnic Jews from its beginning in 1930 until the end of 1938, a period that encompasses the worst excesses of the Great Terror.

Slezkine appears to take a certain pride in the drama of the role of the Jews in Russia during these years. Thus he says they were “among the most exuberant crusaders against ‘bourgeois’ habits during the Great Transformation; the most disciplined advocates of socialist realism during the ‘Great Retreat’ (from revolutionary internationalism); and the most passionate prophets of faith, hope, and combat during the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis”.

Sometimes his juxtapositions between his descriptions of Jewish involvement in the horror of the early Soviet period and the life styles of the Jewish elite seem deliberately jarring. Lev Kopelev, a Jewish writer who witnessed and rationalized the Ukrainian famine in which millions died horrible deaths of starvation and disease as an “historical necessity” is quoted saying “You mustn’t give in to debilitating pity. We are the agents of historical necessity. We are fulfilling our revolutionary duty.”

On the next page, Slezkine describes the life of the largely Jewish elite in Moscow and Leningrad where they attended the theater, sent their children to the best schools, had peasant women (whose families were often the victims of mass murder) for nannies, spent weekends at pleasant dachas and vacationed at the Black Sea.

Again, Slezkine discusses the heavily Jewish NKVD and the Jewish leadership of the Great Terror of the 1930s. Then, he writes that in 1937 the prototypical Jewish State official “probably would have been living in elite housing in downtown Moscow . . . with access to special stores, a house in the country (dacha), and a live-in peasant nanny or maid”. He writes long and lovingly detailed sketches of life at the dachas of the elite—the “open verandas overlooking small gardens enclosed by picket fences…”

Slezkine attempts to dodge the issue of the degree to which the horrors perpetrated by the early Soviet state were rooted in the traditional attitudes of the Jews who in fact played such an extensive role in their orchestration. He argues that the Jewish Communists were Communists, not Jews.

This does not survive factual analysis...

After World War II, in a process which remains somewhat obscure, the Russian majority began taking back their country. One method was “massive affirmative action” aimed at giving greater representation to underrepresented ethnic groups. Jews became targets of suspicion because of their ethnic status. They were barred from some elite institutions, and had their opportunities for advancement limited. Overt anti-Semitism was encouraged by the more covert official variety apparent in the limits on Jewish advancement.

Under these circumstances, Slezkine says that Jews became “in many ways, the core of the antiregime intelligentsia”. Applications to leave the USSR increased dramatically after Israel’s Six-Day War of 1967 which, as in the United States and Eastern Europe, resulted in an upsurge of Jewish identification and ethnic pride. The floodgates were eventually opened by Gorbachev in the late 1980s. By 1994, 1.2 million Soviet Jews had emigrated—43% of the total. By 2002, there were only 230,000 Jews remaining in the Russian Federation, 0.16% of the population. Nevertheless these remaining Jews remain overrepresented among the elite. Six of the seven oligarchs who emerged in control of the Soviet economy and media in the period of de-nationalization of the 1990s were Jews...

Slezkine’s main point is that the most important factor for understanding the history of the 20th century is the rise of the Jews in the West and the Middle East, and their rise and decline in Russia. I think he is absolutely right about this.

If there is any lesson to be learned, it is that Jews not only became an elite in all these areas, they became a hostile elite—hostile to the traditional people and cultures of all three areas they came to dominate.

So far, the greatest human tragedies have occurred in the Soviet Union. But the presence of Israel in the Middle East is creating obvious dangers there. And alienation remains a potent motive for the disproportionate Jewish involvement in the transformation of the U.S. into a non-European society through non-traditional immigration.

Given this record of Jews as a very successful but hostile elite, it is possible that the continued demographic and cultural dominance of Western European peoples will not be retained, either in Europe or the United States, without a decline in Jewish influence.

But the lesson of the Soviet Union (as also Spain from the 15th–17th centuries) is that Jewish influence does wane as well as wax. Unlike the attitudes of the utopian ideologies of the 20th century, there is no end to history.

Kevin MacDonald is Professor of Psychology at California State University-Long Beach. This article is adapted from a longer review [pdf] published in the Fall 2005 issue of The Occidental Quarterly.

A confidential memo circulating among senior Republican leaders suggests that a new attack by terrorists on U.S. soil could reverse the sagging fortunes of President George W. Bush as well as the GOP and "restore his image as a leader of the American people."

The closely-guarded memo lays out a list of scenarios to bring the Republican party back from the political brink, including a devastating attack by terrorists that could “validate” the President’s war on terror and allow Bush to “unite the country” in a “time of national shock and sorrow.”The memo says such a reversal in the President's fortunes could keep the party from losing control of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections.

GOP insiders who have seen the memo admit it’s a risky strategy and point out that such scenarios are “blue sky thinking” that often occurs in political planning sessions.

“The President’s popularity was at an all-time high following the 9/11 attacks,” admits one aide. “Americans band together at a time of crisis.”

Other Republicans, however, worry that such a scenario carries high risk, pointing out that an attack might suggest the President has not done enough to protect the country.

“We also have to face the fact that many Americans no longer trust the President,” says a longtime GOP strategist. “That makes it harder for him to become a rallying point.”

The memo outlines other scenarios, including:

~ Capture of Osama bin Laden (or proof that he is dead);~A drastic turnaround in the economy;~A "successful resolution" of the Iraq war.

GOP memos no longer talk of “victory” in Iraq but use the term “successful resolution.”“A successful resolution would be us getting out intact and civil war not breaking out until after the midterm elections,” says one insider.

The memo circulates as Tuesday’s disastrous election defeats have left an already dysfunctional White House in chaos, West Wing insiders say, with shouting matches commonplace and the blame game escalating into open warfare.

“This place is like a high-school football locker room after the team lost the big game,” grumbles one Bush administration aide. “Everybody’s pissed and pointing the finger at blame at everybody else.”

Republican gubernatorial losses in Virginia and New Jersey deepened rifts between the Bush administration and Republicans who find the President radioactive. Arguments over whether or not the President should make a last-minute appearance in Virginia to try and help the sagging campaign fortunes of GOP candidate Jerry Kilgore raged until the minute Bush arrived at the rally in Richmond Monday night.

“Cooler heads tried to prevail,” one aide says. “Most knew an appearance by the President would hurt Kilgore rather than help him but (Karl) Rove rammed it through, convincing Bush that he had enough popularity left to make a difference.”

Bush didn’t have any popularity left. Overnight tracking polls showed Kilgore dropped three percentage points after the President’s appearance and Democrat Tim Kaine won on Tuesday.Conservative Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum told radio talk show host Don Imus Wednesday that he does not want the President's help and will stay away from a Bush rally in his state on Friday.

The losses in Virginia and New Jersey, coupled with a resounding defeat of ballot initiatives backed by GOP governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in California have set off alarm klaxons throughout the demoralized Republican party. Pollsters privately tell GOP leaders that unless they stop the slide they could easily lose control of the House in the 2006 midterm elections and may lose the Senate as well.

“In 30 years of sampling public opinion, I’ve never seen such a freefall in public support,” admits one GOP pollster.Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin says the usual tricks tried by Republicans no longer work.

"None of their old tricks worked," he says.Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) admits the GOP is a party mired in its rural base in a country that's becoming less and less rural.

"You play to your rural base, you pay a price," he says. "Our issues blew up in our face."As Republican political strategists scramble to find a message – any message – that will ring true with voters, GOP leaders in Congress admit privately that control of their party by right-wing extremists makes their recovery all but impossible.

“We’ve made our bed with these people,” admits an aide to House Speaker Denny Hastert. “Now it’s the morning after and the hangover hurts like hell.”

Thursday, November 10, 2005

WMR has emphasized that the arson attacks are well planned, coordinated, and only plaguing the three major NATO countries that opposed the war in Iraq.

For that reason, European law enforcement and intelligence agencies should place 24x7 surveillance on Israeli diplomatic and intelligence personnel who may be engaged in "Lavon Affair" and "911" style false flag operations.

Such an operation aimed at Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez may have just been uncovered in Trinidad and Tobago.

Police have launched an investigation into claims that video tapes and DVDs handed out at mosques in Dewsbury were being used to recruit terrorists.Posted Nov 9, 2005 09:35 AM PSTCategory: COVER-UP/DECEPTIONS

Criminy; can't these guys come up with an original idea?

This is just a replay of the infamous "Black Panther Coloring Book" distributed by the FBI to wreck public sympathy for the Panthers at a time when their agenda was simply breakfasts for the ghetto kids and local control of school curriculum.

Radio Mayak, Moscow, original in Russian. BBC Monitoring - 2005-11-11:

For a very large number of players - for the Americans, for Israel, for Sharon, for the Egyptians - [Palestinian Minister of Civilian Affairs Muhammad] Dahlan would be the optimal player and politician to replace Abu-Mazin. In that sense, these explosions, and in particular the murder, as a result of one of the blasts, of Bashir Nafi, the Palestinian National Authority's military intelligence chief in the West Bank, is, from my point of view, a clearing of the way for Dahlan.http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20051113&articleId=1236

Xymphora: I think we can take as a given that the target of the bombs was the Palestinians, particularly the chief Palestinian spy, and the Chinese military officials. Besides killing the Palestinians, the bomb was intended to send a message to the Chinese that they shouldn't be dealing with the Palestinianshttp://xymphora.blogspot.com/2005/11/bomb-trigger.html

Have a look at this image of a blown-out drop ceiling in the Amman Hyatt (or this image taken at the Radisson) and tell me the damage was the result of a suicide bomber wearing a vest strapped with explosives, as claimed.

No doubt such is possible—if the alleged suicide bomber was crawling around above the drop ceiling, an unlikely prospect at best.

In a concerted effort to put forward the fanciful suicide bomber story, the Jordanians paraded an Iraqi woman on television.

“The 35-year-old woman [Sajida Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi]—the sister of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s right-hand man who was killed by U.S. forces in Iraq—appeared on Jordanian state TV hours after she was captured by security forces who were tipped off by an al-Qaida claim that a husband-and-wife team participated in Wednesday’s bombings,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

Note how suicide bombings run in Arab families and go all the way up the al-Qaeda family totem pole to the dead Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Obviously, these Arabs are dangerous nihilistic mental cases—or so the corporate media would have us believe.

It is sincerely perplexing the Jordanians knew nothing of the attacks and yet closed in on suspects within a matter of hours.

It is also perplexing why al-Rishawi’s bomb did not go off and she ran out of the hotel with frightened wedding guests—only to be captured (while other al-Qaeda terrorists blow themselves up as the police close in; see my post on the Bali bomber).

During the staged interview, al-Rishawi made sure to tell the world she is a would-be monster who would have targeted innocents if only her bomb had worked.

“There was a wedding in the hotel. There were women and children. My husband executed the attack. I tried to detonate and it failed.”

King Abdullah told NBC “that the targets were Jordanians, and that Jordanians and Palestinians were among the guests at the hotels,” according to the New York Times.

One of the alleged suicide bombers was identified as Safah Mohammed Ali, who was held in Fallujah in November, 2004, at approximately the same time the U.S. flattened and used chemical weapons on the Sunni city, killing resistance fighters, women, children, old people, and family pets.

"The spiritual leader of the rebel council that ruled Fallujah when it fell under insurgent control said in a phone interview that he remembered Ali as a fighter in the Black Banners Brigade. That Fallujah cell was led by Omar Hadid, a local insurgent who rose to prominence as a close associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. Hadid later died in clashes with the U.S. military," according to Knight Ridder.

Last November, the Detroit Free Press reported Omar Hussein Hadid was “technically al-Zarqawi’s underling but in fact the Iraqi face that allowed al-Zarqawi to remain there.”

Since al-Zarqawi is dead, this is either a propaganda fabrication, there is an actual person masquerading as al-Zarqawi, or Omar Hussein Hadid works for the false flag pseudo-gang terrorist group.

More than likely, the Black Banners Brigade is a black op terrorist group (the group is known for kidnapping contractors and truck drivers) and Safah Mohammed Ali was brainwashed, possibly when he was apprehended in Fallujah.

It is not explained why a member of the resistance in Fallujah was not sent immediately to Abu Ghraib for a prolonged session or torture and anal rape while wearing a pair of panties over his head.

But then, of course, Abu Ghraib is reserved for torturing and raping mostly innocent Iraqis, as between 70 and 90 percent of Iraqi detainees held there are innocent of any crime, according to the Red Cross.

~

On 12 October 2002, bombs exploded in Bali. On 16 October 2002, Indonesian police arrested a former Air Force officer who confessed to building the bomb. The confession may have been true.

With the video from Jordan showing a woman making shocking accusations, it is worth recalling the last time when a woman was shown on TV making shocking accusations.

The day after Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Kuwaitis living in the US hired the public relations firm Hill and Knowlton - a job worth $1 million a month...

The story of how Iraqi troops, in the first days of the invasion, went into Al-Adan hospital, tore the sick babies from incubators and left them on the cold floor to die was graphically told to Congress on November 1990 before the crucial vote to send US troops (passed by about 5 votes). What the audience didn't know however was that the 15-year old girl who made the moving, tearful testimony was none other than Niyirah al-Sabah - daughter of the US Ambassador to Kuwait... Nurses (from Kuwait) claimed that they had never seen the girl before in their life.

The entire move towards the Gulf War had thus been motivated by a blatant lie. The girl had been "trained" by Hill and Knowlton... Andrew Whitley of Middle East Watch described the story as a fabrication but it took months for the truth to come out. http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/incubatorlie.html

~~~

The Jordan hotel blasts killed “the commander of the Palestinian Special Forces, Bashir Nafeh, Jihad Fatouh, the commercial attaché at the Palestinian Embassy in Cairo, and Mosab Khorma, deputy Chairman of Cairo-Amman Bank in the Palestinian territories and Col. Abed Allun, another high-ranking Preventive Security forces official, were also killed in the three nearly simultaneous suicide bombings on American-owned hotels.” http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=112

It is common knowledge the Chinese government is nurturing a relationship with the Palestinians and no doubt the Likudites hate this idea since they want the Palestinians to suffer in isolation in their Bantustan ghettoes the same way the Polish Jews suffered in the walled-up Warsaw ghetto. Back in May, Abbas went to China and met with Chinese leaders including President Hu Jintao, Premier Wen Jiabao, and State Councilor Tang Jiaxuan. “The consensus reached by the two sides includes further developing mutually-beneficial and friendly cooperative relations, making joint efforts to push forward the Middle-East peace process, and so on. As far as I know, China and Palestinian side signed five documents of cooperation during this visit, including China-Palestine agreement of economic and technological cooperation, agreement of economic, trade and technological cooperation. China agreed to offer 50 million-worth economic aids and gratis, some aids in kind such as medical equipment, mobile houses and cultural and sports utilities,” according to a statement released by Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Kong Quan. Of course, this would put to waste the years of destruction inflicted on the Palestinians by the Israeli state and the IDF. Best send in the black op al-Zarqawi team to kill a few Chinese along with the important Palestinians.

The Jordanian reaction, to blame it all on the same dead man the Americans use as the scapegoat in Iraq, is probably a reflection of the extremely close ties between the CIA and Jordan's General Intelligence Directorate. I think we can probably chalk this one up to the continuing battle between the Israelis and the Palestinians over who gets to be protected by China after the American Empire collapses under the weight of trying to build the Israeli Empire.

~

"A number of Israelis staying yesterday at the Radisson SAS were evacuated before the bombing by Jordanian security forces" - Haaretz.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Israelis staying at the Radisson on Wednesday had been evacuated before the attacks and escorted back home... Amos N. Guiora, a former senior Israeli counter-terrorism official, said in a phone interview with The Times that sources in Israel had also told him about the pre-attack evacuations... "The question that needs to be answered is why weren't the Jordanians working at the hotel similarly removed?" ~First reports indicated a bomb was hidden above a suspended ceiling in the hotel in Jordan.http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9980123/ :A blast at the Radisson hotel in the Jordanian capital Amman on Wednesday was caused by a bomb placed in a false ceiling, police sources at the scene told Reuters.

Later spin suggested that explosive belts had been used by suicide bombers.

On 12 October 2002, bombs exploded near the Sari Club and the Padi Club in the heart of Kuta, in Bali. 202 people were killed and several hundred were injured. On Oct. 16 Indonesian police arrested a former Air Force officer who confessed to building the bomb.

Bombs rocked three hotels in Amman late last night, killing at least 57 people and wounding more than 115 in apparent suicide attacks. One of the hotels is known to be popular with Israeli tourists.

"There were three terrorist attacks on the Grand Hyatt, Radisson SAS and Days Inn hotels, and it is believed that the blasts were suicide bombings," police spokesman Major Bashir al-Da'aja told The Associated Press. He declined to elaborate.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attacks.

A police official said the attacks were simultaneous and hit minutes before 9 P.M. in two districts in the Jordanian capital, including the commercial area of Jebel Amman and Al-Rabiyeh, which houses the Israeli Embassy.

A number of Israelis staying yesterday at the Radisson SAS were evacuated before the bombing by Jordanian security forces, apparently due to a specific security alert. They were escorted back to Israel by security personnel.

The Foreign Ministry stated yesterday that no Israeli tourists are known to have been injured in the blasts. Representatives of Israel's embassy in Amman were I contact with local authorities to examine any report of injured Israelis, but none were received. There are often a number of Israeli businessman and tourists in Amman, including in the hotels hit yesterday.

Israel's counter-terror headquarters yesterday recommended Israeli citizens not travel in Jordan. Travel recommendations regarding Jordan were tightened a few months ago, but many Israelis still visit the country. Many also visit other regions such as the Jordanian Arava and the ancient city of Petra.

The first bomber, at 8:50 P.M. local time, struck the Grand Hyatt, completely shattering the stone entrance. An AP reporter saw at least seven bodies removed from the hotel and many more wounded carried out on stretchers.

CNN reported an eyewitness saying the Jordanian prime minister's car was at the Grand Hyatt at the time of the blast.

Police said a second explosion hit the nearby Radisson SAS hotel, where about 250 people were attending a wedding reception. At least five were killed and at least 20 wounded in that blast, believed to have been caused by a bomb placed in a false ceiling, police sources at the scene told Reuters....

JERUSALEM - British police told the Israeli Embassy in London minutes before Thursday's explosions that they had received warnings of possible terror attacks in the city, a senior Israeli official said.

Benjamin Netanyahu had planned to attend an economic conference in ahotel over the subway stop where one of the blasts occurred, and the warning prompted him to stay in his hotel room instead, government officials said. Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said he wasn't aware of any Israeli casualties.

Just before the blasts, Scotland Yard called the security officer at the Israeli Embassy to say they had received warnings of possible attacks, the official said. He did not say whether British police made any link to the economic conference...

Odigo, the instant messaging service, says that two of its workers received messages two hours before the Twin Towers attack on September 11 predicting the attack would happen, and the company has been cooperating with Israeli and American law enforcement, including the FBI, in trying to find the original sender of the message predicting the attack.

Micha Macover, CEO of the company, said the two workers received the messages and immediately after the terror attack informed the company's management, which immediately contacted the Israeli security services, which brought in the FBI."I have no idea why the message was sent to these two workers, who don't know the sender.

It may just have been someone who was joking and turned out they accidentally got it right. And I don't know if our information was useful in any of the arrests the FBI has made," said Macover.

Odigo is a U.S.-based company whose headquarters are in New York, with offices in Herzliya.As an instant messaging service, Odigo users are not limited to sending messages only to people on their "buddy" list, as is the case with ICQ, the other well-known Israeli instant messaging application.

Odigo usually zealously protects the privacy of its registered users, said Macover, but in this case the company took the initiative to provide the law enforcement services with the originating Internet Presence address of the message, so the FBI could track down the Internet Service Provider, and the actual sender of the original message.

On 17 October 1961, Paris police, led by a former Vichy minister, Maurice Papon, killed up to 300 protesting Algerians. Some were hurled, still alive, into the Seine.

The sequence of events has not been established, but at the core is an allegation that Papon, also accused of deporting more than 1,600 Jews to death camps during the war, gave police clearance to attack the protesters and dump them into the river. After a curfew was imposed in Paris following the murder of 11 police officers by nationalists, up to 40,000 Algerians arrived in the city centre. At the Pont de la Concorde Metro station police began striking people over the head with clubs.Saad Ouazene, then a 29-year-old foundry worker and an organiser for the Algerian National Liberation Front, had his skull fractured. "I saw people collapse in pools of blood. Some were beaten to death," he said. "The bodies were thrown onto lorries and tossed into the Seine from the Pont de la Concorde."

Some 50 people were clubbed to death in the courtyard of the Paris police headquarters, according to the testimony of a number of shocked policemen.Police records reveal that Papon, who was on the scene and later in the command post, told officers they must be "subversive" in the war. "You will be covered, I give you my word," he said.

After the massacre, dozens of bodies were taken from the Seine as far downriver as Rouen.Attempts to publicise the massacre were censored. Jean-Paul Sartre called it a pogrom in Les Temps Moderne. Papon had the edition pulped.

It has long been alleged that Papon had tacit government backing. There has never been a full enquiry and the archives remain closed.

Papon, now aged 95, was jailed in 1999 for complicity in crimes against humanity. He was released in 2002.

~

Over a million Algerians died in the struggle to liberate their country from French colonial rule.

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

The Blair Government and the Sun newspaper claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could be ready within 45 minutes.

The Blair Government and the Sun newspaper fooled the less well-educated sections of the UK public.

Now Blair and the Sun want 90 day detention for 'terror suspects'. Blair and the Sun are hoping to fool the British public into thinking that this police-state measure will make them safer.

Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, has admitted that MI5 did not request a new law allowing terror suspects be detained without charge for up to 90 days - directly contradicting Tony Blair, the Prime Minister. http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=2191412005

Eric Metcalfe, of human rights group Justice, said: "Ninety days' detention without charge will make the UK weaker, not safer.

"The duty of the Government is not only to protect the lives of its citizens but also their freedoms. The ill-considered measures in this Bill put both at risk."

Even the Government's terror watchdog, Lord Carlile, said the law could be open to challenge under the European Human Rights Act.

Meanwhile a Government dossier outlining how other Western countries deal with potential threats backfired as officials had to acknowledge that none of the other countries surveyed had powers to detain suspects for 90 days.

The dossier showed the maximum detention period pre-charge in Australia is 168 hours. In France it is four days and 13 in Spain. Lib Dem home affairs spokesman Mark Oaten said: "This paper undermines the Government case."

Suspects can currently be held for up to 14 days without charge in Britain.

4. China is now the third or fourth mightiest military power in the world. There has been sabre-rattling against Taiwan and even Japan.

5. In the mostly Muslim autonomous region of Xinjiang, detainees are beaten with shackles, given electric shocks, and kicked unconscious.

6. China's drive for coal-fired power stations is vastly increasing the world output of greenhouse gases, and it is resisting limits. Within 20 years, its output will dwarf any cuts the rest of the world can make.

The UK's Special Reconnaissance Regiment is suspected by some of having links to certain fake terror incidents. The regiment has been linked to the shooting of an innocent man (de Menezes) in London and to alleged dirty tricks in Northern Ireland and Iraq. Is this a regiment with a fascist agenda and is it manned by psycopaths?

One of the army’s most secretive special forces units is facing allegations of sex discrimination and bullying from a female corporal who accuses some of its soldiers of using a picture of her for live target practice.

Corporal Leah Mates, 30, from Calne, Wiltshire, will tell an employment tribunal next month that she was so worried by the incident, involving other members of the Det, a top secret Northern Ireland surveillance unit, that she feared for her life...

The Det is already under scrutiny for its involvement in the surveillance operation in London in July that led to the killing by armed police of the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, who was wrongly believed to be a terrorist.

The Det is now being absorbed into the new Special Reconnaissance Regiment, which is at the forefront of the war on terrorism...

The most serious incident while she was serving with JCUNI came in November 2002 on the unit’s firing range. Three male soldiers, including an NCO who was about to take over as her immediate boss, had drawn a picture of her with her name on it on a target they were using for firearms practice.

“The applicant took the target incident to be a direct threat to her life,” her tribunal application states. “She began to suffer sleeplessness, loss of appetite, headaches and loss of breath.“She felt depressed and stressed. The applicant felt unable to seek medical advice as this would result in her being relieved of her duties.”

After the NCO involved in the target incident took over as her boss, she began to find graffiti about herself on the desks. “She found comments such as ‘Leah is a rat-head’, ‘F*** you Leah’ and ‘Leah is a cow’,” the application states.

In February 2003 her commander saw graffiti about her in the unit bar that said: “Leah is a dog. Tick here if Leah is a dog.”

...She claims that while serving as a lance-corporal in the Balkans in June 1999 she was forced to sleep as the only woman in a tent with seven male soldiers in her section. On another occasion, a corporal who had shared the tent sat down next to Mates as she was working and allegedly ran his hand down her thigh and back. Other soldiers called her “chipboard chest” in a jibe at the size of her breasts, she maintains.